‘The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world’ says the March 2018 Equality Trust manifesto.

Equality Trust have published their National, Local and Individual Manifestos designed to help people across the UK take action to reduce inequality.

The manifestos states:

We must protect and progress workers’ rights: strengthen trade union rights
and introduce employment rights from day one
We must explore the most effective ways of distributing wealth fairly and
efficiently: establish an independent Commission on Wealth
We must end child poverty: reinstate child poverty targets and commit to
eliminating child poverty
We must tackle our housing crisis: establish a large scale house building
programme, prioritising social housing and truly affordable housing,
built to high quality and environmentally friendly standards.
Find out more about the Equality Trust’s manifestos.

‘Banks have to check applicants’ immigration status before allowing them to open a bank account’.

This is according to the February 2018 briefing (pdf) from Global Justice Now on the hostile environment for immigrants.

The briefing finds:

The government is preventing people from accessing safe and secure housing by forcing landlords to carry out the work of immigration officers.
NHS staff are also being forced to demand upfront payment for treatment from people who cannot prove their immigration status
People in the UK without at least six months leave to remain cannot apply for a driving licence
Read the full report (pdf).

‘The impact of changes to direct taxes and benefits is to reduce the income of
Bangladeshi households by around £4,400 per year on average’.

Four months after releasing their 2017 interim report, the Equality and Human Rights Commission have published their final cumulative impact assessment (pdf), in March 2018.

The report exposes how much individuals and households are expected to gain or lose, and how many adults and children will fall below an adequate standard of living, as a result of recent changes to taxes and social security.

The report finds:

Negative impacts are particularly large for households with more disabled members, and individuals with more severe disabilities, as well as for lone parents on low incomes
For some family types, these losses represent over 13% of average net income
At an individual level, women lose on average considerably more from changes to direct taxes and benefits than men
Lone parents in the bottom fifth of the household income distribution lose around 25% of their net income, on average
Around 1.5 million more children are forecast to be living in households below the relative poverty line as a result of the reforms.
EDF and a number of our members have contributed to the development of this important research.

57% of people in poverty are children or working-age adults living in a household where someone is in paid work.

This is according to a March 2018 briefing from the Institute for Fiscal Studies on poverty and low pay in the UK.

The briefing finds:

Low pay is highly related to lack of pay progression. The wages of the low- and high- educated, and of men and women, end up much further apart by age 40 than they were at the start of their careers
Experience and education are both positively associated with higher wages, but the association with experience is much stronger for the high-educated than the low-educated
The fact that women’s wages fall behind their male counterparts over the lifecycle is, in part, related to a remarkable lack of wage progression in part-time work.
Read the full briefing.

‘Relationship breakdown is the largest single trigger of rough sleeping, leading to 42% of male rough sleeping’.

This is according to the February 2018 briefing paper (pdf) from the House of Commons Library. This paper provides background information on the problem of rough sleeping in England, and outlines Government policy on this issue.

The paper finds:

The most recent statistics published on 25 January 2018 recorded a 169% increase in the number of people sleeping rough in England since 2010
Among women, 35% slept rough after leaving home to escape domestic violence
Rough sleeping is at its most severe in London.
Read the full report (pdf).

Despite allegations of serious abuse in immigration detention centers, the UK
persisted in not imposing a maximum time limit for immigration detention, and
continued to detain asylum-seeking and migrant children.

This is from the January 2018 report (pdf) from the Human Rights Watch (HRW). World Report 2018 is their 28th annual review of human rights
practices around the globe.

The report summarises key human rights issues in more than 90 countries and territories worldwide, drawing on events from late 2016 through November 2017.

The report finds:

Germany over the past year made headlines when the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to enter its parliament in decades
Despite a strong tradition of protecting civil and political rights, Australia has serious unresolved human rights problems. Australia continued in 2017 to hold asylum seekers who arrived by boat on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on the island nation of Nauru, where conditions are abysmal
Bahrain’s human rights situation continued to worsen in 2017. Authorities shut down the country’s only independent newspaper and the leading secular-left opposition political society.
In Bangladesh, civil society groups faced pressure from both state and non-state actors, including death threats and attacks from extremist groups.